In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of digital media available online. Some services, such as Apple's iTunes® for example, enable users to legally purchase and download music. Other services, such as Yahoo!® Music Unlimited and RealNetwork's Rhapsody®, provide access to millions of songs for a monthly subscription fee, and YouTube® provides users access to video media. As a result, media items have become much more accessible to consumers worldwide. Due to the large amount of accessible digital media, recommendation technologies are emerging as an important enabler to assist users in identifying and navigating large databases of available media. Recommendations are useful to help users identify and select media items of interest for usage and/or play.
Recommendations may be programmatically-generated by a company based on the user's predefined preferences and/or profile. Recommendations may also be provided by other users. Particularly, the users may be peers on a social network. The social network provides for the exchange of media item recommendations among the users, such as the result of a recommender playing a media item, for example. As such, the user in the media item recommendation system may be both a recommender of media items to other users and a recipient of media item recommendations from other users. In this manner, the user may receive a media item recommendation from another user and transmit a media item recommendation to other users.
Current recommendation technologies allow the recipient to select the other users in the media item recommendation system from whom the recipient desires to receive recommendations. The recipient may do this by establishing one or more friends lists. In this manner, if a recommender is listed in one of the recipient's friends lists, recommendations from that recommender will be sent to the recipient. If a recommender is not listed in the recipient's friends lists, recommendations from that recommender will not be sent to the recipient. However, even if a recommender is listed in one of the recipient's friends lists, the recipient may be sent recommendations that may not be desirable or interesting. Also, a particular recommender may not be suitable, in the recipient's perspective, to make a certain type of recommendation. For example, a particular recommender may not be known as a connoisseur of a certain music genre. Accordingly, the recipient may not highly value song recommendations in that music genre from that recommender and, therefore, may not be interested in being sent such recommendations from that recommender.
A recourse for the recipient to stop certain types of recommendations being sent from an unsuitable recommender is to delete the recommender from the friends lists. However, the deleted recommender may be suitable for making another type of recommendation, such as for songs in a different music genre for example. Because that recommender was deleted from the recipient's friends list, the recipient will receive no recommendations from that recommender, even for the types of recommendations for which the recipient may consider that recommender suitable.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method that allows the recipient to control and customize the types of recommendations the recipient may be sent from different recommenders based on the recipient's perspective and at any given time.